Well, you've got to get the transcript, it was sadly difficult to follow along since he based the segment on the theory of the collapse of the dollar...
"Who knows, we don't...
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Pundita
Wednesday, October 7
The Dollar's Demise: Glenn Beck and Larry Kudlow get sucked into Robert Fisk's brain
...Robert Fisk's war reporting has made him one of Britain's most honored journalists, but he is also so notorious for taking liberties with the concept of reporting that a form of literary criticism was devised and named just for him; it's called fisking, whereby the critic publishes an entire Fisk article then does a sentence-by-sentence deconstruction.
I will not attempt to fisk Mr Fisk's October 6, 2009 The Demise of the Dollar for The (U.K.) Independent, any more than I would attempt to draw a perfect circle freehand while drunk.
But in brief he took a dollop of fact from here and a smidgen of fact from there and conjured a soupcon of something from somewhere. Then he crowned the mishmash with a tale told to him by unnamed "Gulf Arab and Chinese banking sources in Hong Kong."
The tale involved secret meetings among Gulf Arabs, China, Russia, Japan and France "to end dollar dealings for oil, moving instead to a basket of currencies including the Japanese yen and Chinese yuan, the euro, gold and a new, unified currency planned for nations in the Gulf Co-operation Council, including Saudi Arabia, Abu Dhabi, Kuwait and Qatar" to go into effect in 2018.
A senior Gulf OPEC official told Dow Jones in Dubai that he had no idea where Fisk got his information but that Arab Gulf members of OPEC were not in talks about dropping the U.S. dollar in favor of a basket of currencies in the trading of crude oil. And Kuwait's oil minister assured a Reuters reporter that there were no talks among Gulf Arab exporters to replace the U.S. dollar for trading oil.
The denials were of course ignored. The Drudge Report picked up Fisk's tale and headlined it, "Arabs plot to drop dollar." And so it came pass on Tuesday night that Fox's Glenn Beck and CNBC's Larry Kudlow based their dire warnings about the state of the U.S. dollar on a Fisk tale. (1)(2)
Robert Fisk is a 9/11 Truther; given how much derision Glenn heaped on Van Jones for Jones's association with the Truthers, I surmise that Glenn or his research team were so riveted by Fisk's assertions they didn't pay attention to the author.
And Larry Kudlow has expressed so much worry in recent weeks about the dollar's weakness that it's likely he saw the article as grist for his mill, but without his noticing the name of the author or researching him.
As a general rule the more controversial the claims in a news story, the more one needs to consider the source. And given the source in this case, and that he didn't name his sources, the Fisk article makes for fish wrap even though it contains bits and pieces of facts.
http://pundita.blogspot.com/2009/10/dollars-demise-glenn-beck-and-larry.html
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